Mechanics

I'm sitting a Mechanics paper as one of my Maths modules tomorrow and I'm stuck on a practice question, please can someone help if they can.

A car is towing a trailer along a horizontal straight road using a horizontal tow-bar. The masses of the car and the trailer are 1050kg and 200kg respectively. The resistance to motion of the car is 850N and the resistance to motion of the trailer is 150N.

Question
At an instant when the driving force exerted by the car is 1100Nm find,
a) the acceleration of the car
b) the pulling force exerted on the trailer

At another instant the pulling force exerted on the trailer is zero
a) show that the acceleration of the car is -0.75m/s/s
b) find the driving force exerted by the car

a) F = ma
1100 = (1050 + 200)a
1100/1250 = a = 0.88m/s/s

Do I need to use the resistances in the above?

b) What is the pulling force? Is it like a resistive force?

Um, and I don't understand the rest
Please can someone explain it to me.

Free Body Diagram FBD

b) if you do a free body diagram on the trailer then it has three forces on it:

1. its weight pointing straight down.
2. The pulling force exerted on it by the truck
3. The resistive force in the opposite direction of the pulling force.

The point of this question is for you to realize that the force on the trailer is less then the force exerted by the truck because the force on the truck is being spent to overcome the resistive force on the truck and to accelerate the truck.

pulling force

The resistive forces are the only ones acting on the car and trailer.

There should be no pulling force on the trailer but do not confuse the two issues. The pulling force question was just a detail of the previous problem. Now we want to talk about the car and trailer together as 1 system again so we do not really need to think about the pulling force.

Meaning, the car and the trailer are accelerating at 0.75m/sec/sec when the car is not exerting any pull on the trailer.
Why then is the aceleration negative? -0.75m/sec/sec?

>>>b) find the driving force exerted by the car.

The system is in motion, the car is not pulling the trailer, the acceleration is 0.75 m/sec/sec.
On the car only:
Let D = driving force exerted by the car
F = m*a
(D +850) = 1050*(0.75)
D +850 = 787.5
D = 787.5 -850
D = -62.5 N
It is negative. That means the direction of D is opposite that of the resistance to motion of the car. Meaning, D is trying to stop the car, or trying to slow down the car.
So, that is why the acceleration should be negative.